Fatal train accidents on Europe's railways: 1980–2009

This paper presents an analysis of fatal train accident rates and trends on Europe's main line railways from 1980 to 2009. The paper uses a new set of data for the European Union together with Norway and Switzerland, assembled partly under the auspices of the European Railway Agency and partly on the author's own account. The estimated overall trend in the number of fatal train collisions and derailments per train‐kilometre is ‐6.3% per year from 1990 to 2009, with a 95% confidence interval of ‐8.7% to ‐3.9%. The estimated accident rate in 2009 is 1.35 fatal collisions or derailments per billion train‐kilometres, giving an estimated mean number of fatal accidents in 2009 of 6.0. The overall number of fatalities per fatal accident in 1990–2009 is 4.10, with no apparent long term change over time, giving an estimated mean of 24.6 fatalities per year in train collisions and derailments in 2009. There are statistically significant differences in the fatal train accident rates and trends between the different European countries, although the estimates of the rates and trends for many individual countries have wide confidence limits. The distribution of broad causes of accidents appears to have remained unchanged over the long term, so that safety improvements appear to have been across the board, and not focused on any specific cause. The most frequent cause of fatal train collisions and derailments is signals passed at danger. In contrast to fatal train collisions and derailments, the rate per train‐kilometre of serious accidents at level crossings remained unchanged in 1990–2009. The immediate causes of most of the serious level crossing accidents are errors or violations by road users.